To install and use Coq, we recommend relying on the Coq platform or on a package manager (e.g. opam or Nix).
See https://coq.inria.fr/download and https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki#coq-installation to learn more.
If you need to build Coq from sources manually (e.g. to contribute to Coq or to write a Coq package), the remainder of this file explains how to do so.
To compile Coq yourself, you need:
-
OCaml (version >= 4.09.0) (This version of Coq has been tested up to OCaml 4.14.1, for the 4.x series)
Support for OCaml 5.x remains experimental.
-
The Dune OCaml build system >= 3.6.1
-
The ZArith library >= 1.11
-
The findlib library (version >= 1.8.1)
-
a C compiler
-
an IEEE-754 compliant architecture with rounding to nearest ties to even as default rounding mode (most architectures should work nowadays)
-
for CoqIDE, the lablgtk3-sourceview3 library (version >= 3.1.2), and the corresponding GTK 3.x libraries, as of today (gtk+3 >= 3.18 and gtksourceview3 >= 3.18)
-
[optional] GNU Make (version >= 3.81)
See below for a discussion of platform-specific issues with dependencies.
Primitive floating-point numbers require IEEE-754 compliance
(Require Import Floats
). Common sources of incompatibility
are checked at configure time, preventing compilation. In the
unlikely event an incompatibility remains undetected, using Floats
would enable proving False
on this architecture.
Note that OCaml dependencies (zarith
and lablgtk3-sourceview3
at
this moment) must be properly registered with findlib/ocamlfind
since Coq's build system uses findlib
to locate them.
Debian / Ubuntu users can get the necessary system packages for CoqIDE with:
$ sudo apt-get install libgtksourceview-3.0-dev
Opam (https://opam.ocaml.org/) is recommended to install OCaml and the corresponding packages.
$ opam switch create coq --packages="ocaml-variants.4.14.1+options,ocaml-option-flambda"
$ eval $(opam env)
$ opam install dune ocamlfind zarith lablgtk3-sourceview3
should get you a reasonable OCaml environment to compile Coq. See the OPAM documentation for more help.
Nix users can also get all the required dependencies by running:
$ nix-shell
The OCaml compiler and findlib are build-time dependencies, but also run-time dependencies if you wish to use the native compiler.
Note that Coq supports a faster, but less optimized developer build, but final users must always use the release build. See dev/doc/build-system.dune.md for more details.
To build and install Coq (and CoqIDE if desired) do:
$ ./configure -prefix <install_prefix> $options
$ make dunestrap
$ dune build -p coq-core,coq-stdlib,coq,coqide-server,coqide
$ dune install --prefix=<install_prefix> coq-core coq-stdlib coq coqide-server coqide
You can drop the coqide
packages if not needed.
Packagers may want to play with dune install
options as to tweak
installation path, the -prefix
argument in ./configure
tells Coq
where to find its standard library, but doesn't control any other
installation path these days.
When loading plugins or vo
files, you should make sure that these
were compiled with the same OCaml setup (version, flags,
dependencies...) as Coq. Distribution of pre-compiled plugins and
.vo
files is only possible if users are guaranteed to have the same
Coq version compiled with the same OCaml toolchain. An OCaml setup
mismatch is the most probable cause for an Error while loading ...: implementation mismatch on ...
.
Coq binaries which honor environment variables, such as COQLIB
, can
be seeded values for these variables by placing a text file named
coq_environment.txt
next to them. The file can contain assignments
like COQLIB="some path"
, that is a variable name followed by =
and
a string that follows OCaml's escaping conventions. This feature can be
used by installers of binary package to make Coq aware of its installation
path.